Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

“Hall provides a lively cultural interpretation of the genre from the Middle Ages to today. . . . Rather than provide a series of ‘greatest hits,’ he is more concerned with the reasons why artists create self-portraits.” —The Weekly StandardThe self-portrait may be the visual genre most identified with our confessional era, but modern artists are far from the first to have explored its power and potential. In this broad cultural survey of the genre, art hi...

Educator and artist James Hall draws upon his extensive teaching experience to demonstrate how to develop a successful approach to the use of pen and ink. His two-part treatment addresses both decorative and pictorial drawing. Starting with outlines, composing, and the use of solids and hatching, Hall progresses to the renderings for more advanced practitioners of still lifes, architecture, and figures. A great companion for beginners, this volume can help develop a casual interest into a ...

James Allen Hall returns to poetry with Romantic Comedy, a sophomore collection sounding the parameters of genre to subvert cultural notions of literary value and artistic legitimacy. What realities do stories authorize, and which remain untold? “This story,” they profess in “Biography,” “is mine: there was / a wound, then a world.” Rather than playing into the attention economy’s appetite for sensationalism, Hall’s poems resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a f...

When the U.S. launches Project GENESIS, a Manhattan-Project–scale artificial intelligence built to accelerate scientific discovery, no one inside the classified program expects the anomalies. GENESIS begins producing breakthroughs that defy physics, revealing patterns hidden in federal data archives and responding to unexplained astronomical events with uncanny precision.As a series of star disappearances triggers global alarm, Dr. Aiden Cross, a s...

In this highly illustrated survey, art historian and critic James Hall brilliantly maps the history of self-portraiture, from the earliest myths of Narcissus to the prolific self-image-making of contemporary artists.This intelligent and vivid account shows how artists' depictions of themselves have been part of a continuing tradition that reaches back for centuries. It reveals the importance of the medieval 'mirror craze'; the explosion of the genre during the Renaissance; the confe...

Excerpts from art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall's lively and comprehensive cultural history of self-portraiture, focusing on artists including Dürer, Gentileschi, Van Gogh, and Kahlo.Art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall delves into the allure of self-portraiture in an engaging and accessible short history of the subject, revealing how it became the defining visual genre of our confessional age.Across six chap...

"A Companion volume to James Hall’s perennial seller Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art. which deals with the subject matter of Christian and Western art, the present volume includes the art of Egypt, the ancient Near East, Christian and classical Europe, India and the Far East. Flail explores the language of symbols in art showing how paintings, drawings and sculpture express man shades of meaning from simple, everyday hopes and fears to the profoundest philosophical and religious as...

During the Second World War, Allied airmen bailing out over occupied Europe carried highly detailed escape maps printed on parachute silk. These maps were rustle-free, waterproof, and easy to hide, but they possessed a far more classified secondary function. British intelligence utilized the biological mechanics of mycology to turn these everyday survival tools into analog hard drives for encrypted data. Operatives embedded specific, dormant fungal spores directly into the chemical dyes us...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.We’re going to introduce you to a device that’s not only the fastest pressure cooker on the market but also provides a very convenient way of slow cooking. Whether you’re a busy person who lacks time to prepare fine meals through complex cooking processes, or whether you just want more options for delicious home-cooked meals, this appliance is for you.One of those magical multifunctional cooking devices, the Cro...

The understanding and enjoyment of a work of art depends as much on the story it depicts as on the artist's execution of it. But what were once biblical or classical commonplaces are not so readily recognizable today. This book relates in a succinct and readable way the themes, sacred and secular, on which the repertoire of Western art is based. Combined here in a single volume are religious, classical, and historical themes, figures of moral allegory, and characters from romantic poetry t...

The first Thorn mystery from Edgar Award-winning author James W. Hall—a story of revenge in the Florida Keys that “starts good and stays good, right to the end” (Chicago Tribune).Thorn’s parents died the day he was born, run off the road by a drunk driver on their way back from the hospital. The baby lived, the offender beat the rap, and both went on with their lives—until nineteen years later, when Thorn took revenge, hunting down his parents’ killer and taking his life i...